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9
    ROCKING AS IF AFLOAT on troubled waters, abused by an unearthly and tormented sound, Junior Cain imagined a gondola on a black river, a carved dragon rising high at the bow as he had seen on a paperback fantasy novel featuring Vikings in a longboat. The gondolier in this case was not a Viking, but a tall figure in a black robe, his face concealed within a voluminous hood; he didn’t pole the boat with the traditional oar but with what appeared to be human bones welded into a staff. The river’s course was entirely underground, with a stone vault for a sky, and fires burned on the far shore, whence came the tormenting wail, a cry filled with rage, anguish, and fearsome need.
    The truth, as always, was not supernatural: He opened his eyes and discovered that he was in the back of an ambulance. Evidently this was the one intended for Naomi. They would be sending a morgue wagon for her now.
    A paramedic, rather than a boatman or a demon, was attending him. The wail was a siren.
    His stomach felt as if he had been clubbed mercilessly by a couple of professional thugs with big fists and lead pipes. With each beat, his heart seemed to press painfully against constricting bands, and his throat was raw.
    A two-prong oxygen feed was snugged against his nasal septum. The sweet, cool flow was welcome. He could still taste the vile mess of which he had rid himself, however, and his tongue and teeth felt as if they were coated with mold.
    At least he wasn’t vomiting anymore.
    Immediately at the thought of regurgitation, his abdominal muscles contracted like those of a laboratory frog zapped by an electric current, and he choked on a rising horror.
    What is happening to me.
    The paramedic snatched the oxygen feed from his patient’s nose and quickly elevated his head, providing a purge towel to catch the thin ejecta.
    Junior’s body betrayed him as before, and also in new ways that terrified and humiliated him, involving every bodily fluid except cerebrospinal. For a while, inside that rocking ambulance, he wished that he
were
in a gondola upon the waters of the Styx, his misery at an end.
    When the convulsive seizure passed, as he collapsed back on the spattered pillow, shuddering at the stench rising from his hideously fouled clothes, Junior was suddenly struck by an idea that was either sheer madness or a brilliant deductive insight:
Naomi, the hateful bitch, she poisoned me!
    The paramedic, fingers pressed to the radial artery in Junior’s right wrist, must have felt a rocket-quick acceleration in his pulse rate.
    Junior and Naomi had taken their dried apricots from the same bag. Reached in the bag without looking. Shook them out into the palms of their hands. She could not have controlled which pieces of fruit he received and which she ate.
    Did she poison herself as well? Was it her intention to kill him and commit suicide?
    Not cheerful, life-loving, high-spirited, churchgoing Naomi. She saw every day through a golden haze that came from the sun in her heart.
    He’d once spoken that very sentiment to her. Golden haze, sun in the heart. His words had melted her, tears had sprung into her eyes, and the sex had been better than ever.
    More likely the poison had been in his cheese sandwich or in his water bottle.
    His heart rebelled at the thought of lovely Naomi committing such treachery. Sweet-tempered, generous, honest, kind Naomi had surely been incapable of murdering anyone—least of all the man she loved.
    Unless she hadn’t loved him.
    The paramedic pumped the inflation cuff of the sphygmomanometer, and Junior’s blood pressure was most likely high enough to induce a stroke, driven skyward by the thought that Naomi’s love had been a lie.
    Maybe she had just married him for his…No, that was a dead end. He didn’t
have
any money.
    She had loved him, all right. She had adored him.
Worshiped
would not be too strong a word.
    Now that the possibility of treachery had occurred to Junior, however, he couldn’t rid